Wrestling Observer Rewinder

October 04, 2004

We open this week with the death of Ray Traylor, best known to most people as the Big Boss Man, who passed away at age 42. His wife came into the living room and found him on the couch. She kissed him and felt he was cold, asked if he needed a blanket, and when he didn't respond, realized he wasn't breathing. 911 was called and he was pronounced dead at the hospital from a suspected heart attack. Traylor was close friends throughout the years with both Curt Hennig and Rick Rude, both of whom passed away in recent years and, of course, he's yet another wrestler to die in his 40s.
We run through Traylor's career: his debut as Big Bubba Rogers, bodyguard for Jim Cornette, which got over instantly and turned Traylor into a main event star almost overnight headlining huge cards against Dusty Rhodes. Moving to WWF, where he was given the prison guard gimmick based on a real job he once held, gave Hogan some of his best in-ring matches in 1989 when Hogan vs. Boss Man was doing HUGE house show business, going to AJPW in 1993 where he was in line for a major push as a top foreigner before WCW signed him away a few months later. He bounced around in WCW until 1998, going through several gimmicks (The Boss, Guardian Angel, his original Big Bubba Rogers name, and even his real name) but floundered throughout the run aside from a few brief moments (he and Hogan main evented the first ever Nitro, for instance). He returned to WWF in 1998 as a heel version of his old Boss Man character as The Corporation's bodyguard. But he wasn't all that great anymore in the ring and eventually transitioned to an OVW trainer role that he hated and stopped showing up for. Regardless, rather than release him, WWE kept paying him until his contract expired and he had mostly just been picking up indie dates ever since.
We have an even longer part 2 of the Jim Barnett obituary from last week, in particularly focusing on his time as a promoter in Australia. Sorry, I ain't doing all this. As always, this is super interesting but there's just so much of it...
You can tell it's a slow week when Dave decides to jump on a soapbox and analyze the state of the business. In this case, he talks about how many of the biggest stars ever (Sammartino, Hogan, Road Warriors, Austin, Goldberg, etc.) were people who were often booked as unbeatable superheroes by their promoters and how you have to give preferential treatment to certain people to create mega-stars. Sammartino had somehting like 130+ headlining matches at MSG and was pinned exactly ONE time. Hogan was the big star of the 80s and when he lost the WWF title, it took a memorable double-ref screwjob to do it. These guys were HEAVILY protected, rarely lost, and when they did lose, it was done in memorable ways that meant something, ways that people still remember 30 years later. This, of course, turns into a rant about how nobody is protected anymore and in WWE particularly, no one is allowed to become bigger than The Brand. Take Goldberg for instance. WWE refused to give him preferential treatment, and as a result, he became just another guy on a roster full of guys who trade meaningless 50/50 wins and losses. If WWE had treated Goldberg as if he was something special, it might have upset some of the locker room but it would have made everyone involved a lot richer and wouldn't have killed Goldberg's aura off so badly. Then there's the flip side: you have to know when to stop giving preferential treatment. In mid-90s WCW, Hulk Hogan was easily the biggest star they had and WCW treated him as such, and they made a lot of money. But by the late-90s, WCW fans were sick of Hogan and yet, the company continued to protect him at the expense of everyone else and it hurt them. But long story short, in order to create mega stars like that, you have to be willing to give certain people preferential booking treatment. WWE's refusal to do that has them heading into 2005 without anyone poised to become the next breakout star because they book everyone to appear equal to everyone else (I know people are going to respond to this and say "Cena became the next big star, shows how much Dave knows!" And while that's true, I would argue that during the years Cena was on top, from 2005-2017 or so, ratings, attendance, and overall popularity of WWE was eroding the entire time. Cena was the biggest star of his era, but he was never close to doing the kind of business that names like Bruno, Hogan, and Austin did. He never truly became a breakout star like that in wrestling and only really has become a mainstream, household name in recent years due to his acting success).
WWE's next upcoming PPV is Taboo Tuesday, with matches and stipulations voted on by the fans, but it's clear that WWE is manipulating the booking and the polls in order to get the results they want. For instance, fans can vote on Triple H's opponent (choices being Shawn, Benoit, Edge, and Orton) so you'd think the field is wide open. But all the booking on TV is clearly trying to build a Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels feud, and they're basically all but begging fans to vote for Shawn. They're willing to accept Benoit as well. As for Orton, the idea is to put off a Triple H/Orton rematch until Wrestlemania, so they want to make sure Orton doesn't win this poll. So instead, they're heavily pushing Orton vs. Flair.
2000 Olympic gold medal winner Rulon Gardner was backstage at Smackdown meeting with WWE officials about getting into pro wrestling. They had discussions back in 2000 but they never went anywhere because Gardner wanted too much money and only wanted to do a one-off match, since he still had aspirations for the 2004 Olympics at the time. WWE passed on the deal. Gardner won a bronze medal this year and has since retired from amateur wrestling. Dave isn't sure. He's farm boy strong like Brock Lesnar but doesn't have the same impressive look. He's also 33 years old, which is a bit old to be starting out in pro wrestling. WWE apparently made him an offer, which he's said to be seriously considering and is discussing with his family. It's said his mother is actually against him doing pro wrestling. Dave thinks they might have a small window to push him and get some mainstream publicity out of it, since Gardner is a bigger star coming out of these most recent Olympics than Kurt Angle ever was in 1996. But in order to do that, they'll have to rush him to the main roster quickly, and Dave isn't optimistic that Gardner is going to be the next Kurt Angle. 99.9% of the time, when you rush someone through developmental with very little training, they don't turn out that great (see almost everyone that Vince has pulled up from OVW in the last year). Gardner has also received offers from PRIDE and UFC, but decided MMA wasn't something he was interested in (he does end up having one fight for PRIDE at the end of this year, but that's it).
Dave has seen the most recent NOAH show from Budokan Hall. It was their first major show since its big Tokyo Dome debut and it kinda shows the problem with NOAH right now: Kenta Kobashi doesn't have any more challengers to his title. Worse, Kobashi's title run has been so legendary and the matches so great, that whoever does eventually beat him is likely going to pale in comparison. Also, NOAH does long matches because that's what people expect now, but the top matches on this card would have benefitted a lot by being shorter. Elsewhere on the card, Trevor Rhodes, a student of Harley Race, worked an undercard match (that would be Trevor Murdoch, doing a full blown Dusty gimmick with bionic elbow and everything). 22-year-old rookie Go Shiozaki is clearly going to be a star, as he's already very good. Low-Ki, in the biggest match of his career, failed to win the GHC Jr. title but the match was fantastic and stole the show and Low-Ki got over big. And the main event, Kobashi retaining over Akira Taue, was fine but not great, and probably one of the weakest matches of Kobashi's reign. The crowd was into it, but there's simply no one left for him to beat and no more challengers that are believably on Kobashi's level.
Keiji Muto and Mitsuharu Misawa will be teaming up for the first time ever to face Hiroshi Hase and Kensuke Sasaki at a big show at the end of this month. It's Muto's 20th anniversary show and the team of he and Misawa together is basically a dream team. Of course, they faced off against each other as part of a tag match at the recent NOAH Tokyo Dome show. Time will tell if we ever get the Misawa vs. Muto one-on-one dream match (spoiler: we never do).
Speaking of all this, Misawa has recently said he plans to go after the GHC title again, saying he's the only one who can beat Kobashi. This is a bit of a tricky situation because the last time Misawa and Kobashi faced each other was March of 2003, in yet another Match of the Year. But they billed that as their final singles match ever, and NOAH is a promotion that has always tried to live up to its stipulations. That being said, if NOAH plans to run another Tokyo Dome show next year, Misawa vs. Kobashi is probably the only match that can draw without bringing in outsiders. But it would mean breaking their promise.
Sting recently did an interview saying he would be open to working with TNA again in the future. As for WWE, he says he regrets that he's never gotten to work with Triple H, Shawn Michaels, The Rock, or Undertaker. But he also said that when he watches WWE, he thinks they're making the same mistakes WCW did by keeping the same guys on top for too long.
New Jack no-showed his own retirement show this week. No idea why he's planning to retire (he obviously didn't) but apparently he has an outstanding warrant in the area and someone gave him a heads up that he would be arrested if he showed up. So he didn't.
Bret Hart's autobiography is on hold, pending the outcome of a lawsuit he has against Lloyds of London over an insurance claim related to the end of Hart's career. Plans for a WWE-released DVD on his career have also been paused. Bret and Vince met awhile back and agreed on plans to release the DVD, so long as Vince would publicly apologize for what happened in Montreal. Vince apologized to Bret, but has so far refused to apologize publicly. WWE then pitched the idea of having both Bret and Vince give their side of the story on the DVD, but Bret doesn't want to use the Montreal incident to sell his DVD. It's part of his history but he doesn't want to be defined by it. Bret and Vince are still in communication and they're said to be cordial, but there's still an underlying tension between them that has never gone away, and as a result, Bret doesn't trust anything Vince says. For his part, Vince is willing to say whatever Bret wants to hear personally, but he's reluctant to do so publicly because he doesn't want to admit he was in the wrong, while Bret basically refuses to go any further with the WWE relationship until Vince does.
British wrestler Roy Bevis, who wrestles as Zebra Kid, was sentenced to 9 months in jail for drunk driving. Yes, this is Saraya's older half-brother. And it's only the beginning of his legal troubles in the coming years.
TNA wrestlers Andy Douglas and Johnny Devine were both stabbed after a fight at a night club in Nashville last week. They were leaving the club, got into a fight with a group of people, one of whom had a knife. Douglas was released with stitches in his leg the same night, but Devine was more seriously injured and underwent several hours of surgery due to a stab wound to the stomach, resulting in his gallblader being removed (he had some intestine removed as well). He's been told it'll be several weeks before he can resume training. The men who attacked and stabbed them fled the scene and have not yet been caught.
Sean Waltman and Joanie Laurer (X-Pac and Chyna) are back together, as that toxic relationship continues. Chyna has been peddling a sex tape of her and Waltman to different distributors but so far, no one has taken her up on the offer (give it time).
TNA's TV tapings in Orlando take place on Tuesday and all talent has been asked to arrive to Orlando on Monday. This past week, Jeff Hardy was the only one who didn't arrive Monday. Shocked?
More heat between Vince Russo and Jerry Jarrett. Turns out Jarrett has a book out regarding the early days of TNA. Dave hasn't read it yet but I guess Jarrett wasn't too kind towards Russo in the book and Russo is pretty pissed. He did an interview, saying that the wrestling business is the worst business in the world. Privately, he wrote an email to Jerry saying he couldn't understand why one Christian would do that to a fellow Christian. Oh dear.
Wrestlemania 21 tickets sold out in under an hour when they went on sale, to the surprise of no one. For the first time ever, Raw the night after WM will be airing from the same venue (Staples Center). The current big matches penciled in are Triple H vs. Orton and Angle vs. Undertaker (neither of these happen). Even though the truth was impressive enough, WWE still felt the need to lie. They put a press release out stating that all 15,000 available tickets sold out in less than 1 minute (not true) and that all 10 previous WWE events at Staples Center had been sold out (even more not true).
More on the Eddie Guerrero/Kurt Angle fight last week. Eddie felt Angle was disrespecting him during their matches, in particular multiple instances where Eddie asked him not to work so stiff, and another instance where Angle slapped him in the back of the head during a match after Eddie had asked him to stay away from hitting him in the head. To be fair, Angle did immediately apologize for that when Eddie brought it up. Angle, meanwhile, complained that Eddie was dead-weighting him at one point during a recent match and wouldn't pick himself up off the mat when Angle tried to get him to stand up, which was said to be Eddie being pissed and refusing to cooperate. Just a bunch of little shit like this that finally boiled over between them. Both guys are being blamed for letting tensions boil over but a lot of it is being put on Eddie, who's nerves are frayed and he's mentally breaking down lately (damn it's depressing to read all this stuff. Eddie desperately needed time away from this shit and never got it).
Speaking of Angle, he did an interview and put over Triple H, Eddie, and Benoit as the best workers in the company. One of those is certainly the smart political choice to say. Angle also said his favorite match of his career is the 2003 Royal Rumble match with Benoit. Although he also claimed the match was 40 minutes when it was actually only 20. But whatever. He's right, it's a hell of a match. He said he wants to stick around for the long haul and intends to work smarter and not take anymore chairshots to the head, leading Dave to say, "I wish everyone thought like that because mush-brains in later life is not a good thing." He also claimed he would never take another German suplex or do a moonsault off a cage again. Needless to say, he did plenty more of both.
Billy Gunn has been sent to rehab. He was found passed out at an airport a few weeks back and that was the final straw for management (this is pretty much the end of the road for Billy Gunn in WWE. He gets released next month and spends the next couple years absolutely burying WWE and specifically Triple H. He later admitted he was out of his mind on drugs during this time and apologized for it all later).
The latest on Steve Austin's crazy ex-girlfriend Tess Broussard: tabloids dug up some past dirt on her. Back around the time she started dating Austin, the 36-year-old was advertising herself online as a 26-year-old Playboy model turned escort charging $750 for sex. She also worked as a call girl under the name Brenda Bing and was arrested by undercover cops back in Jan. 2003 which is roughly around the same time she started dating Austin. She was arrested with 113 condoms in her purse. She pled guilty and was put on probation and had a bunch of community service as well. She later claimed that she was innocent and only pled guilty to spare her family a trial but ya know...
Speaking of legal issues, the Plane Ride from Hell lawsuit filed by flight attendants against Ric Flair, Scott Hall, and Dustin Rhodes seems to have disappeared. Dave doesn't know currently if it was dismissed or settled out of court, but either way, it's done (I believe this was settled out of court by WWE).
Notes from 9/23 Smackdown: Moolah and Mae Young teamed up for a match and Dave is pretty over the whole 80-year-old-women-wrestling thing. Kurt Angle shot Big Show with a tranquilizer gun. "Once you're using guns and killing babies for heat, you're in really rough shape," Dave notes about the current state of the company. He thinks the tranq gun was as dumb as anything WCW ever did during its final years. Angle then shaved Big Show's head while Michael Cole screamed that they were "raping him of his dignity" which Dave is certain had to be a Vince line. In fact, Vince used that exact phrase in the 80s during a similar Andre The Giant angle with Ken Patera and Big John Studd.
No Raw notes for whatever reason.
The plan is to form a group with Kurt Angle, Luther Reigns, and Mark Jindrak. They will be given a group name and basically be Smackdown's version of Evolution. Dave thinks Angle will need to be a miracle worker to make this work given Jindrak's complete lack of charisma and both men's in-ring skills (this doesn't work. They hang around Angle for a month or two and then it fizzles out for that exact reason: Reigns and Jindrak sucked).
Rey Mysterio and RVD are going to be put together as a team and the plan is for them to win the tag titles at some point (indeed, they win the titles 2 months after this).
Parts of Raw had to be re-written because nobody told Lita to come to TV. They initially told her to stay home and would keep her off TV to sell the miscarriage angle. But then plans changed and they wrote her into multiple segments for this week's Raw as a major part of the show. Problem is....no one told her. So she never showed up and they had to re-write everything at the last minute when they realized she wasn't there. The Raw writing staff and the Talent Relations department have been pointing fingers at each other over the miscommunication and most of the heat has fallen on John Laurinaitis.
Jesse Ventura has been giving speeches on college campuses lately, giving his thoughts on current politics. He said the 2-party system is evil and said he refuses to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. He criticized George Bush for sending people overseas to fight when he himself wouldn't do it. He also said he is considering running in 2008. When asked if he still supported wrestlers unionizing, he didn't really give an answer, but did say that "he almost got killed trying to unionize wrestlers once before, so he got his SAG card instead." When asked who he sides with in the Montreal Screwjob situation, he said Vince because he's the owner and the boss. "Nobody can ever accuse Jesse of thinking deeply on any subject," Dave quips.
Mick Foley and JBL recently participated in a political debate as part of the Smackdown Your Vote campaign. The idea of the debate was Foley's idea. The original idea was for Foley to debate Val Venis. As many people know, Venis is a staunch Libertarian and is said to be well-versed on political topics and is strongly anti-union. But apparently that didn't happen and we got JBL instead. JBL has since said that he's considering getting into Republican politics and named Ohio congressman Bob Ney as his political role model (fun fact: Bob Ney's Wikipedia page has a whole section about his time spent in prison if you're curious how his political career turned out). Anyway, here's a recap of the debate because the footage seems to be lost:
With all the recent talk of Randy Orton being the youngest world champion ever, you may remember that Dave named a couple of others who were younger when they won their world titles (Lou Thesz and Kerry Von Erich). Well, turns out there's another one Dave forgot: the Big Show. Or rather, The Giant in WCW, and was only 24 years and 2 months old when he won the WCW belt. So Orton isn't even the youngest world champion currently in WWE.
Booker T is expected to turn babyface soon since they need people to go against Angle's heel group and to feud with JBL (indeed, Booker turned face a couple weeks after this). They're going to wait until after Booker's US title match against Cena at the No Mercy PPV, which Cena is flying into from Australia where he's currently filming his WWE Films movie. On the flip side, William Regal is likely going the other way and is expected to turn heel on Eugene eventually (that doesn't happen because Eugene gets injured first).
Simon Dean (formerly Nova in ECW) was nearly released until his current gimmick came along. He was on the chopping block, but he pitched the idea and I guess it got to Vince on a good day because he loved it. So now it's on TV and everyone backstage who didn't support or care about him before and wanted to release him, they all suddenly love the guy now because Vince does. Basically a bunch of "yes men" who thought he sucked until Vince decided he didn't, and now they all love him.